If you're planning on spending Easter queuing at a DIY store (it's that or being stuck in a Bank Holiday traffic jam), latest research by the Federation of Master Builders (FMB) reveals that every year UK homeowners waste £500 million on dodgy DIY and disastrous building projects.
As you launch into "improving" your home and garden this Easter, UK homeowners have confessed that as a result of poor planning and trying to do it all themselves, their home improvement work takes far longer (36%), costs more (17%) and they don't get what they want in the end.
According to independent research commissioned by FMB, we spend far longer sorting out a holiday (35 days) or buying a car (99 days) than planning home improvement work (24 days). Indeed we spend four times as long planning a car purchase as a major home improvement project, such as a loft extension or a conservatory.
Despite this, we are a nation of stubborn DIY-ers - still far too keen to do the work ourselves rather than get a tradesperson in - with 40% doing all building work, including major building projects, themselves. Only one in three (29%) homeowners said they would hire a tradesperson.
People had definitely learnt from their experiences however. After the problems of their last building project, 34% said they would now always use a competent tradesperson for any building work and 47% said they would use a competent builder for larger jobs and continue to DIY smaller jobs and a stubborn 16% said they would continue to DIY all jobs themselves.
"Of course we can blame home improvement programmes and celebrity developers for making the whole thing look far too quick and easy to do yourself. But it's also important to remember that most home improvement disasters are down to poor planning from the outset and also knowing your limits," said Ian Davis, director general of the Federation of Master Builders. "Many of our members are called in to sort out half finished DIY jobs, that end up costing homeowners far more than they bargained for."
To help with that vital research and planning, the FMB has produced a free booklet with C4 Property Ladder presenter Sarah Beeny outlining all the basics you need to consider before embarking on home improvement work.
